


Rigging Random Chance

by silveradept



Series: Rigging Random Chance [1]
Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Compliments Exercise, Creative Methods of Probability Manipulation, Gen, Messing With Probability, Mme. Bustier Knows More Than She Lets On
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-11
Updated: 2019-07-11
Packaged: 2020-06-26 06:40:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19762666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silveradept/pseuds/silveradept
Summary: Everybody knows that the compliments exercise in Mme. Bustier's class is not random. Except, perhaps, Mme. Bustier.It's not a thing anyone should take a wager on, though.





	Rigging Random Chance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AlexSeanchai](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlexSeanchai/gifts).
  * Inspired by [The Compliments Exercise](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/497497) by AlexSeanchai. 



It is an open secret among the class Mme. Bustier is professeure principale for (and the rest of the students at Collège Françoise Dupont) that the selection of who will be giving each other compliments is rigged.

If asked directly, they will all deny it, to a person, but each student participates, in greater and lesser ways, in influence operations to throw off the randomization toward their preferred result.

All of this manipulation was Chloé's fault, no matter who in class you asked.

Ivan, Juleka, Mylène and Rose quietly resolved to pull their names out after Chloé had "complimented": 

  * Ivan's grace (the day after he accidentally broke a statue in the art room)
  * Mylène's courage (the day after she had ran screaming from a purple butterfly that eventually got Sabrina)
  * Juleka's voice (the day before they all decided to form Kitty Section as a fuck-you when Chloé had told Juleka point-blank she couldn't sing)
  * and Rose's taste (the day after Chloé had deliberately unfolded as many of Rose's origami cranes as she could get her hands on, chiding Rose for believing in the magic of the thousand paper cranes. Alix had complimented Rose's right hook the next day.)



They rotated the duty among themselves, to make sure they could avoid suspicion and keep Mme. Bustier and the rest of the class distracted enough to extract their names.

Alix and Kim egged each other on into increasingly improbable situations. Chloé had said how nice it was to not have to worry about competition from Alix (the day after she had tentatively come out as ace) and had needled Kim about his second place finish at at a meet as "far better a finish than she had expected".

The first time Alix outran Kim to the bowl when Mme. Bustier was distracted, it was apparently on. No method seemed out of bounds for them, including a time where the students watched in awe as Kim rappelled down the side of the building during a lunch period, only to have Mme. Bustier shut the window he was planning on using to get in just before she would have seen him. Sometimes they would enlist one or another classmate in their plans, usually as a distraction. Chloé, unsurprisingly, was a favorite target.

Nathaniel always had a sketch handy when he was volunteered. Every single one of them involved Chloé suffering some form of cartoonish violence, even if Chloé was not involved at all in the compliment. Chloé didn't care about how many times she'd delivered backhanded compliments about Nathaniel's drawing talents, only that those talents were being put to use to make her look ridiculous. When pressed, Nathaniel would usually compliment that Chloé provided him with endless inspiration for his sketches.

Max kept statistics on the distribution of compliments and tried to predict who would be next, based on the assumption that Mme. Bustier wanted to maintain an even distribution of given and received compliments among the students. Chloé had dismissed the creation of Markov as a "cute toy" instead of the advanced artificial intelligence that he was. In retribution, Max made sure that Markov always hacked Mme. Bustier's file with all the names of the class to substitute one without Chloé's name on it right when it was about to go to the printer.

After Chloé had trashed his musical taste by thanking him for "exposing her to XY's favorites", Nino always volunteered to fold the slips to put them in the bowl, and creased each of them just slightly differently enough so that he could tell which one he wanted to pull out when it was his turn to choose. Some of his classmates had caught on to the system and used it for themselves.

Alya mostly wondered why everyone else seemed to be invested in flashy methods. A little sleight-of-hand made it easy enough to substitute whichever name she wanted when it was time to choose. She would never admit to anyone that it was because Chloé had complimented her "straightforwardness" in pursuing what she wanted, with the clear implication that she was flaunting herself wherever she went.

Lila always managed to turn her compliment of someone else into a bigger compliment to herself, and claimed she was always working on getting it right every time Mme. Bustier pointed out the intention of the exercise. Chloé had to grudgingly admit that Lila had a bigger sense of self-confidence than she did. Everyone else wondered what sort of blackmail Lila had on Chloé to get her to give a genuine compliment.

Chloé would never stoop so low as to sabotage the draw in her favor by flooding the bowl with slips with her name on it, of course. That was what Sabrina was for, and Chloé made sure Sabrina kept the bowl well-stocked.

Adrien watched all of the maneuvering with worry. It was pretty clear who was going to get thrown in the path of any oncoming butterfly if they got the opportunity to do so, or failing that, who was going to be the primary target of the newly-created akuma. Yet Chloé was still his first friend and she needed someone to, if not stick up for her, to give her the opportunity to explain that she didn't really intend to be that mean to someone else. 

That Chloé usually did intend to be that mean was a source of stress for Adrien that he didn't need.

Everyone but Adrien assumed Marinette participated as well, because Marinette never had to give a compliment to anyone she didn't have a genuinely nice thing to say to. And almost always had someone draw her the day after she had done something nice or supportive to them. She had run afoul of Chloé often enough for everyone to believe she was involved, but her classmates were in awe of her ability to manipulate things to her advantage without any sort of obvious tell or method. They were also a bit jealous of the way she could say with a straight face that she was just lucky, given how much she professed to hate liars.

Which is why everyone stopped and stared when Mme. Bustier pulled _Lila_ out of the bowl for Marinette to give a compliment to.

Lila settled in to watch Marinette squirm and come up with something nice to say. To her disappointment, Marinette started speaking almost immediately.

"I can honestly say that I appreciate Lila's ability to tell very convincing stories about herself," Marinette started. "It would be a _shame_ if Lila didn't turn her talents toward writing bestselling novels. All she would have to do is change the names of the people involved and she would rake in royalties from her fiction."

Lila's smugness disappeared immediately.

"She gets so much practice creating convincing stories out of whole cloth," Marinette continued sweetly, "that it's really hard for anyone else to tell whether Lila is telling her classmates about her life or asking us to be part of her beta readers group. I'm thrilled to be included, but I really would love her to ask first."

Lila's eyes began to blaze with anger, and she pointedly looked at Mme. Bustier to enlist her aid.

"I'm intensely jealous of all the things Lila has claimed to do with her life," Marinette continued. "I mean, until I met her, I thought Chloé was the perfect example of a jet-setting society girl who could visit all the places I wanted to go but just couldn't afford."

Chloé realized she'd been insulted by proxy, but was far too interested in hearing what Marinette had to say next to protest.

"It must be exhausting, all the superhero work Lila does, too, since Ladybug—"

"I think that's enough, Marinette," Mme. Bustier interjected. "We're out of time for this morning's exercise. Take your seat, please."

"Okay!" Marinette said, smiling as she bounced back to her place.

"Class, as usual, open your notebooks, please, and write a short reflection on what you just heard," Mme. Bustier said.

Pencils and pens quickly scribbled, each of Marinette's classmates writing down their reflections on the morning's exercise. _Do not aggravate Marinette_ was a common theme in those reflections.

* * *

It was no secret at all to Caline Bustier that her compliment drawing bowls were profoundly rigged. Her students at Collège Françoise Dupont tried very hard not to be obvious about what they were doing, but they were still teenagers who hadn't learned the fine art of subtlety.

She had realized early on that Adrien was observant enough that he could come up with something genuinely complimentary for anyone at any time. 

Lila was still new enough that she wasn't sure, but she had a suspicion that Lila would be able to twist any attempt at a compliment into praising herself, instead.

There were times where she had to try very hard not to laugh while also pretending not to notice their efforts. Alix was noticeable enough when she was in her correct seat, but she really stood out when sitting next to the others in her class as she slipped down rows. At least she had been able to smile when she'd shut the window after hearing Kim coming from the roof. 

Nathaniel's caricatures of Chloé had threatened her façade several times, even though she knew it would be unprofessional to laugh. She thought it might be a good idea to see if M. Guiraud knew anyone that worked at Charlie Hebdo and if they were taking student interns.

Sometimes she had to pretend not to notice the opposing camps staking out her room when she went to lunch. Or that they had very clearly moved the bowls, even when they tried to put them back in the same space. The picture they made when looked at from her seat was unmistakable, after all. She'd even tried to help them by suggesting they occasionally looked at things from her perspective, but they didn't take the hint.

She could at least appreciate the more subtle attempts. The way Nino folded. Max's belief that she wouldn't check to make sure all the names were present. Alya forgetting that she had to disguise herself for the audience behind as well as the audience in front. Chloé always making sure to be nowhere near when Sabrina had to change the bowls. Sabrina, at least, didn't really try to hide what she was doing and always apologized when they would have a short chat about standing up to Chloé.

Which left Marinette. Most of the students were so wrapped up in their own attempts to influence the selection that they didn't consider their own teacher might be working against them.

Caline suspected Marinette knew more than she let on. She was perceptive enough to pick up on what her classmates were doing. She'd been looking at Max's analysis and trying to work out with him how random their selection actually was. When Caline tried to get her students to focus on something else long enough to meddle with the selection herself, Marinette always seemed to be the last one to stop looking at her and the first to start again after she was done.

And this morning, when she'd engineered for Marinette to talk about Lila, Caline could have sworn Marinette winked at her before launching into one of the better backhanded compliments she'd heard from the students. She'd had to cut Marinette off before Lila attracted an akuma to herself, but Caline had heard enough to know that the majority of Marinette's general hostility toward Chloé had transferred to Lila instead.

What she needed to know was _why_. And the best way she knew to get to that why was to keep them talking. 

It looked like her class was going to go through a long streak of Marinette and Lila having to give each other compliments. After all, "random" drawing sometimes worked like that, didn't it?

**Author's Note:**

> The original form of this work said Mme. Bustier's class was a homeroom class. A commenter pointed out that French students don't have homeroom as such, so a substitution was made to be more accurate and to give Caline the role she likely has for her students, based on what happens in her classes. Otherwise, the story is unchanged, so I hope you enjoyed it.
> 
> (This note will make a comment thread make more sense, if you read the comments.)


End file.
